Insert “Skill Bites” Into Your Course to Enhance Discipline Specific Development Nancy Harris – Computer Science Renee Herrell – Career and Academic Planning

Outline for Today Introductions Overview of JMU first-year students Why should you care about this? Some literature to support Ralph Walters College project Experience of a first-year teacher Adaptation of an exercise to your students Wrap up

Intro – Activity – 5 min Individually, list 3 traits of your students that enhance their ability to learn in your class. Individually, list 3 traits of your students that impede their ability to learn in your class. Share with your group.

The Transition to College

INDEPENDENCE?

Activity – How well do you know our first year students? These figures come from self-reports of the incoming 2007-2008 class. Of the 3748 students enrolled, 3592 participated in the survey.

EXPECTATIONS 11

JMU Admissions Website 2006 - 2007 Freshman Class Profile Applications: 17,765 Applicants accepted: 62.6% Applicants enrolled: 3,748 Average SAT Score: 1140 * SAT mid-50 percent range: 1080 - 1240 * ACT mid-50 percent range: 23 - 28 * Top third of high school class: 88% First-year retention rate: 91.8%

How does JMU choose which students to admit?

JMU Admissions Requirements – from the JMU website Quality of High School Academics Academic Achievement Standardized Tests Secondary School Report and Recommendations Extracurricular Activities

So what are the challenges we as faculty face?

Lack of academic preparedness for college level courses National Survey of First-Year Curricular Practices Summary of Findings by Betsy O. Barefoot, EdD What, in your opinion, is the most significant problem or difficulty at your institution that affects the academic success of first-year students? Lack of academic preparedness for college level courses Poor time management strategies General adjustment issues Working too many hours off campus Absence of motivation

How can we as faculty impact the development of our students How can we as faculty impact the development of our students? Can we make a difference in their ability to learn?

What does the literature tell us? Historically, developmental programs have been separated from the discipline specific classroom. Railton and Watson state: “What we often end up doing is expecting students to adapt their practices to fit ours as if by osmosis: we expect students to speak the same language as us and intuitively understand the adjustments in their learning practice that higher education demands.”

Railton and Watson study Discussed conditions in a first-year student class that encouraged small group discussion. What they found was that students were in roles of “student” to the teacher’s “teacher” rather than the role they wanted them to be, that of autonomous “learner” in a classroom facilitated by the “teacher” mentor and guide. Specific strategies were developed to improve students’ deep reading ability and to create conditions where they were encouraged to learn on their own within groups of other learners.

And we see other skills that students struggle with Historically, we have provided support to certain populations of students. Learning disabled students (when they were provided access to higher education.) Students coming into school with specific testable deficiencies (many community colleges see developmental education as a cornerstone of inclusion of all comers.) The kinds of skills taught to the “learning disadvantaged” students are the same kind of skills that can benefit all students just as providing Universal Design can benefit all students.

And we see today First year students struggle with time management, critical thinking skills, reading skills, and learning how to learn. Traditionally non-disadvantaged students had to identify their own need and seek out those kinds of supports. (Such as our first year involvement programs.) There is a certain stigma in seeking out such help. Students don’t take advantage of the help provided outside of the classroom in any great numbers.

And… We are seeing more and more diversity in our classrooms. College is no longer for the elite. High schools also seem to be producing students less prepared for higher educational rigor…strategies that help them do well in high school with accountability testing do not always help them do well in college. Students who did well in high school find that college work is more difficult than expected.

Retention A number of schools have approached this problem from a retention perspective…how can we help our students to be successful? JMU has an excellent retention rate. Somehow the students are succeeding. So why are we interested in helping them to learn?

Rationale By embedding some learning strategies into course content, we can help our students to become better learners and ease the transition to college academics. Research suggests that students will retain the skills better if taught with direct applicability to the content. See Burchard, Arendale Different disciplines require different strategies. Students should read a programming text differently than a history text differently than a novel.

Skill bites Booklet was developed by Raymond Walters College (University of Cincinnati) and the RWC Smart Connections Learning Community in 2006. Specifically, they were looking at supporting their incoming students and helping them to begin to think and learn like others in the discipline. Exercises include very general skills (time management, study habits, etc), but also weave in discipline specific skills and learning about the discipline.

My classes I teach the two course introductory programming sequence in Computer Science (CS 139/239). Students are primarily first-year Computer Science majors. These students have varying backgrounds in CS from no prep in the field to AP or dual enrollment. I also teach a gen-ed critical thinking course, GISAT 160 in Cluster 1.

What I have done - CS I looked at some of the things that trouble the students the most in my classroom. Cheating (sadly it is often an issue) Learning to learn for Computer Science Time management – large projects get away from them (and large projects will be an ongoing theme of their CS work) Learning to use a wide range of tools to direct their own learning … it is a necessity in our changing field.

My theme is to try to make them successful in my classroom Making the textbook a partner in their education. Understanding learning styles – learning how they learn. Understanding and preventing cheating on programming assignments. Using a quiz “gatekeeper” to encourage reading and study before lab activities Applying time management principles to larger projects. Working in groups.

I also use exercises directly related to being a JMU college student We use exercises where students must program: Calculation of a weighted average. Calculation of a GPA (which gets into what quality points are and what grades affect their GPA). Creating a program to calculate a target test score to achieve a particular grade. Despite having these students as advisees, they don’t seem to know how to do these things.

Ongoing I purposefully model strategies to learn and discover from the software that we use. I use the tools that they are learning to explore different problem solving strategies. I purposefully model the notion that in solving computer problems, there is often no “right” answer but many equally right answers. (Getting them away from black and white thinking.)

GISAT 160 This course is different in that it is a more general skills course. I use many of the activities from the Skill Bites book in that class room directly. They are learning how to think and to think and read more critically. I tell the students that I am trying to help them become more strategic consumers of information.

Differences between these populations. CS Students don’t like just doing what they perceive as unnecessary skills development. The Learning Style exercise was a bust from their point of view (heard about it in TAP and at the end of the semester review). If I “hide” development skills in a big dose of CS “sugar”, they accept it and seem to learn from the activities. The GISAT students, because of the nature of the course, seem to enjoy the self-discovery activities.

Skill bites book Examples and exercises with classroom instruction and homework. Most are designed to take 20 minutes or less of classroom time.

Specific examples of adaptation of a general skill to classroom specific learning. Textbook introduction Teaches them how to use the textbook and what resources are there Textbook Scavenger Hunt.doc Example of a lab quiz (using Blackboard adaptive release to control access to lab material) They need to pre-prepare for the lab with the basic concepts required for that lab Learning style activity To help them to see how they might have to approach the course material.Learning Styles.ppt and Index of Learning Styles Cheating case studies – demo This is in your booklet Yeo article – students don’t always perceive actions as being honor violations that we in fact treat as such. Time management exercise – adaption of a Skills Bite exercise for my class – demo This is in your booklet Help students to plan for and execute a large project.

Other learning strategy sources http://www.studygs.net Landsberger http://coe.jmu.edu/learningtoolbox/ JMU College of Education http://www.rwc.uc.edu/library/librarypdfs/qu ickskillsbites.pdf

Now your turn… Choose one thing in your classroom that you would like to see your students do better or that will help them to learn the material better. Note taking Time management Critical reading Choose an activity that you would like to adapt to your specific discipline. In the time remaining, work out how you might adapt that activity to the specific issue that you have in class. Discuss with your colleagues how you will proceed.

Insert a Skill Bite into your course What one learning deficiency do you want to address?  At what point in the course does this become an issue? Or at what point in the course would you like to address it so that it does not become an issue? What are your specific objectives in doing this activity? Can it be tied into another assignment or is it a stand- alone or new activity? Is there an existing strategy on which you can model your activity? What is it? How will you adapt that strategy for your specific class? How will you sustain the new student behavior throughout the rest of the semester?

Share What one thing will you try in your class, if not this semester, then next.

Resources We have a number of the resources (papers, books) available to peruse after the workshop.